iPhone 4S sales to get 18.8 million 3GS upgrades

iPhone 4S sales should be strong suggests Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, who projects that a good portion of sales will come from iPhone 3GS users upgrading to the latest Apple smartphone. He predicts that 18.8 million iPhone 3GS users will upgrade to the iPhone 4S within the next year, which will account for 18 percent of sales.

Munster estimates that there are 27.6 million iPhone 3GS users that are ready to upgrade with 25 percent of those users upgrading early to the iPhone 4, and 15 percent switching to Android, leaving 18.8 million left to buy the iPhone 4S. He claims that these numbers are based on several conservative assumptions.

In a previous survey of 216 mobile users, Munster found that 94 percent of iPhone customers expect to replace their current device with a new iPhone, while only 47 percent of the Android users polled expected to upgrade to another Android device. And among the Android users, about 42 percent wanted to switch to an iPhone.